


Tasting Copper

by Sonora



Series: Blood, Titanium, and Midnight [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: 18th Century, Alternate Universe - Not Related, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Bloodplay, Character Turned Into Vampire, Fights, M/M, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Origins, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 19:52:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/982952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles never had anybody in his life, until one of the investors in the estate he's been all but sold to takes an interest.</p><p>Or, the AU where Herc's a vampire and thinks Chuck should be, too, set in 18th century, convict-era Australia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tasting Copper

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/2747.html?thread=3838651#t3838651) on the Kink Meme.
> 
> Herc might talk a bit too much, but it's like, 1785; I assume he would have to be a bit more proper back then. Plus, sensual!vampire!Herc and stoic!goodsoldier!canon!Herc are a bit hard to reconcile. I tried? Oh, and Chuck calls Herc "daddy" a bit, but I don't think it really qualifies as kink since it's more about ribbing him, so I didn't mark it (feel free to yell at me, if this is the wrong answer, and I'll change it).
> 
> The very existence of this fic is further proof that I either need to get some friends, get laid, or get a job. Not sure which at this point. Heh. I am so, so sorry, peeps, really I am.

“When will you cease this pointless defiance, Willoughby? It is most unbecoming.”

Charles squinted upwards towards the stairs, the burst of afternoon light that accompanied the creaking of the door a most unpleasant sensation. He’d lost count of the days he’d been in the dank, putrid, oven-like pit that lay in reserve for those who would not bend to their masters’ whips. Little more than a hole in the ground beyond the stable yard, he’d had plenty of time to become accustomed to it since the lottery assigned him to the Briggs and Connolly Estate a year hence.

Fuck, but he hated the place. 

The treatment was far from what he had been informed it would be; worse in most ways, more lenient in others. He had witnessed no men flayed alive, nor thrown to the crocodiles. But he himself had received more than his fair share of beatings, working for men whose interest in keeping their prisoners alive ran in cycle with the arrival of the ships from England. He’d been starved, worked near to death, growing sugar cane, and had occasion to witness at least two men rot from spider bite. Perhaps a doctor might have helped, but convict labor was cheaper than a surgeon’s fees.

And the Briggs of the estate - Connolly had not yet shown his face on the continent, as far as Charles knew - were spendthrifts.

 _God-rotted bastards, the lot of them,_ he thought to himself, and spit.

“Answer me, prisoner!”

“When your wife gets on her knees for me, p’rhaps I will be in a better mood,” he said, knowing his smile would be keen in the pool of light.

It earned him another two days. And cost him his supper - thin and worthless though the food was, Charles had never willing turned it down.

He hunched back in his corner, praying that none of those flesh-melting spiders find him in the half-darkness, and tried to ignore the gnawing growl of his belly.

A man sometimes hallucinated in the pit, saw old friends, lovers, family who had passed on, or at least, had never made the hellish ocean crossing to Australia. Charles had had nobody in England; no mother, father, brothers, uncles, grandparents. Not since his father was killed, serving in the king’s army in some foreign war, his mother remarried and her new husband refusing to accept an angry ten year old boy. He’d grown up on London’s streets after that, fighting for every scrap of food, every bit of warmth. 

He never saw anything in the pit.

Just drifted, in the heat and the bitter taste of airless dark. For days, until they released him back into the fields, only to earn himself a place in its depths again, facing the emptiness of his own mind and the vacancy of his short life.

He’d been in the pit a dozen times, without seeing anything.

But that night, he thought he saw something. 

A creature, eyes luminous as a cat’s but blue, blue as the ocean he’d seen from the prison hulk on his way here, the darkness gathered about it like a shroud, attention bent on him most keenly.

 _They say, of all the men on my estate, you find your way down here most often,_ something whispered to him in the dark. _Tell me, darling, why be this miserable thing, when you could shine through eternity?_

Charles had no idea what it meant. Only that his next memory was of being drug up into the sticky pre-dawn, the smells of smoke and turned earth already rising from the field, shivering as the guards poured water across his fevered, naked skin.

 _Get up!_ one of them was screaming, _get up, you son of a whore!_

The whips would come. He knew that. But they’d told him _a week in the pit,_ before they’d thrown him in, and it seemed that not a single muscle in his body remembered how to hold itself upright.

Groaning there in the dirt of the yard, Charles thought he felt that attention from before, that intent from those evil dreams. That inhuman thing, watching him.

But all he saw - before he passed out again, after he turned his eyes to the steps of the grand plantation house - was a rough-clad man with blue eyes and thick red stubble standing on ancient leather boots at the top of the stairs.

Watching him.

+++++

The overseers may have let men die in the field on a routine basis, but the estate was not without a minor clinic, staffed by the few female convicts who hadn’t the luck of finding some male guard or officer to attach themselves to back in Port Jackson. Charles had never had much interest in them - his distinct lack of interest in women was, in fact, the thing that had landed him here, some constable catching him in the act - but some of the men took a keen interest in them. The guards, therefore, were very selective about who they admitted to the clinic for any period of time.

Waking there, in an actual bed with actual sheets, was a rare treat indeed.

“One of the investors, late of Dublin, insisted upon proper care for you,” one of the nurses told him, when she brought him by a bowl of delicious, beautifully warm broth, far better than the damper that made up the bulk of the estate’s diet. “He is insisting upon it for all the workers.”

“I-Investor?”

“Mister Connolly. One man has already died in the three days he has been here. Seems he is none too pleased ‘bout that.”

“An investor who cares?” Charles snorted. “Horse shit.”

But it turned out that the man in question did care, at least enough to come by the clinic that evening.

Same red stubble, same blue eyes, but he’d obviously washed and dressed from some trunk, and Charles could barely stand the sight of him, tall and lean, oddly pale skin made more alabaster in quality by the high, finely starched cravat gathered at his chin, the dark green jacket clinging tight around his broad chest, hair gathered simply at the nape of his neck and curling in the humid air. A soldier, a warrior, somebody used to hardship and accustomed to the dirty places of the world, strong and unyielding, somebody who might have stood fast against all that had brought Charles so low.

A better man. Somebody to admire. To aspire to be, to...

Charles felt his face grow hot, grateful for the blanket across his lap as that dirty desire stirred anew in his loins. 

“Are you not going to thank me, lad?” the man asked, Irish accent lilting full and proper. “The truth now, and only the truth. I shall know if you lie to me.”

It took everything Charles had to not say _yes, I shall_. He felt heavy, like a weight had been placed around his neck and himself tossed into the sea. “For what?”

“For keeping my partner’s hounds from your flesh this morning.”

He shook his head, not wanting to talk, somehow unable to stop himself. “In the yard this morning or the fields on the morrow, it matters not. I shall die on this estate, whether I am grateful for another day of misery or no.”

“What makes you so certain you shall meet such a fate?”

The man was coming closer, and Charles felt strangely drawn in, even as something else in him screamed for him to shrink back. “Because... because there is no other fate for me. I was convicted of a crime and sent to this blasted country to die.”

“Then why do you fight it so?”

The man was above him now, one hand on the creaky wooden headboard of the rough little clinic bed, and Charles wanted desperately to be anywhere, anywhere but this comfort. Mr. Connolly’s eyes were the sea, and he was drowning in it. 

“I... I could... I...”

“Perhaps I may guess,” Mr. Connolly said, and his other hand - so cold - was on Charles’ cheek. “Perhaps you, lad, merely cannot abide the thought of dying, even if you say you accept it. Or perhaps you are angry because anger is all that you know. But,” and his face dipped low, near to Charles’ own, a queer little grin on his lips, “perhaps you are a warrior, and the thought of dying at the hands of lesser men, unable to reach your full potential, fettered and tortured by a world scared of you and all you may accomplish, is an anathema to you.”

Charles stared. Nobody had ever... he was a boy from the gutters, filled with unnatural, evil urges for which he could not account, he was nothing, he was _below_ nothing, and for some fine, landed gentleman to... “What the hell do you know about me, Irishman? Why do you presume these things?”

But the new investor just leaned closer. “Sleep now,” he whispered in Charles’ ear. “Nobody is dying here tonight.”

Despite himself, at that command, his eyes slammed shut, his senses shut down. But on the edge of himself, as he was toppled - nay, felled - into dreaming, Charles could have sworn he felt a prick, a rush, a pleasure unlike any he had ever known, emanating from his neck.

He was discharged, back to hut and field, three days later.

He didn’t see Mr. Connolly again for a month.

+++++

Word was beginning to spread through the prisoner huts; some kind of pestilence had taken hold in the land. People were dying, faster than before. Some new disease, new insect, that bit at the neck and turned the blood thick and viscous in the veins, or must, for there was no blood that drained from the bodies when inspected by the district surgeon. All the dead passed at night.

Or so the rumors went.

All anyone knew for certain was that the corpses were rolled into pits and quietly burned, nobody speaking of it.

So, minus those small inconveniences of waking up to see the guards hauling another body out of one of the tiny little huts, life continued as normal on the Briggs estate.

The days ran together, an endless misery of labor and cramped muscles and not nearly enough to eat. That was a given, the constant of his life since Briggs had won his service at the lottery in Port Jackson. And since the pit this last time, he’d begun having dreams. Nightmares, he might have classified them, the way they tortured him, erotic and brutal, always the same. A lover, coming to him in the darkness, laying with him, teasing him, teaching him all the ways his body might respond, pain shooting through his neck and thighs and chest as the visitor bit and sucked and laved. Another man, it seemed, those old lustful thoughts that had plagued him every day of his life, turned demonic.

Sometimes, he thought it was Mr. Connolly’s face that he saw. A red-headed devil, tormenting him.

If Charles had been a more hopeful man, he might have prayed for deliverance. But he had never held much stock in a god who had seen him cast out in the streets, a mere boy, and instead checked his pallet for blood and seed in the mornings, hoping for some proof that what he felt in the night might stay true in the dawn.

It never did. 

Of course not. 

The world had never shown him any kindness.

Why would it?

But there was one bright spot in the rhythm of his blighted life. Some of the convicts, the better behaved, received wages. Not him, never him, but some did. Piddling amounts, barely enough to buy oneself an extra ration of meat, but even a piddling amount, in their circumstances, seemed a fortune. And, as any fortune did, it attracted attention.

Chiefly, in the form of gambling. Cards, dice, all the usual vices from the sordid streets of London.

But Charles’ favorite had - and always would be - fighting.

Bare-knuckle boxing matches were convened occasionally, when there was cash and drink enough on both the convict side of things and the free settlers’ - which was not much improved from the convict. Guards were bribed and a ring would be marked off, sometimes in the bush, sometimes on the threshing floor. This month, they were in one of the many sheep barns that dotted the estate, unused while the flocks were out at pasture. 

Once a man stepped in the ring, he stayed in, until he lost a fight.

Charles, that night, had made it through four opponents. Up to the fifth, which was always the final and toughest match of the night. He knew not whom he’d be up against next, only that it would be - as usual - somebody older and stronger. But the purse was good, for the man who won, and he’d placed a few bets on himself through various acquaintances who could stand him, and despite the creeping exhaustion, he had hopes for a good night.

He’d heard many a sermon in the public square - from proper ladies in proper clothes, from preachers and clergy - about the evils of fighting, of gambling, of tempting the soul with such corrupt wickedness.

But Charles only felt alive anymore on nights like this, the sensation of bone smashing into flesh the only thing that roused his spirits from the gray monotony of his days.

And it was there - resting against the rough rope perimeter of the bullpen, still recovering from the last fight, soaking in the screams and jeers of the crowd, letting the fury carry him high into the space where instinct was all and violence was natural as breathing - that Charles caught those predatory blue eyes watching him through the tobacco-and-opium haze of the crowd. 

Keen, calculating, sizing him up in a way that made him feel naked, standing there on the dirty barn floor in nothing but a loose pair of work trousers.

As if the man was staring clean through him.

Seeing every secret, every corner of his soul, every...

“Willoughby!”

Those eyes were gone, and the ring was in front of him, and Charles tried to put the strangeness of it all from his mind.

Never before had he felt so affected by anyone, anything.

Never before had he hungered for any woman’s touch, the way he hungered for that man’s.

 _Focus yourself,_ he ordered, and, light on his bare toes, stepped into the ring.

He and his opponent - a man he didn’t know, another convict, covered in the tattoos of the Royal Navy - touched fists, showed their hands palm-up to the guard playing referee, as another read out the rules. No weapons were allowed, nor metal, nor hits below the belt. No killing allowed on the Briggs and Connolly Estate, but Charles felt his heart being to speed, his blood heat, with anticipation.

The referee stepped back.

A bell was rung.

Charles was younger, more fleet of foot, more agile on the rough, unpaved ground, but the other man was heavier, taller, and hit with the force of a mule’s hind leg. And Charles was tired, whereas his opponent was fresh, and ten seconds in, they both began to feel that. The other man landed hit after hit, beating him back, and for a moment, Charles felt a knee begin to cave.

Then, as a hard left haymaker broke his nose, blood flying across the churned sawdust, he caught sight of those eyes again.

And something in him seemed to snap.

For some reason, he could not bear to go to the ground. Not with Mr. Connolly watching him. Not with that man as his audience.

Charles caught the next blow in his palm, forced the man’s hand back, and struck.

Sweat and bloody smeared his face, rage his vision, and the world clamped down to only the ring, only the man in front of him. Dimly, Charles was aware of the bruising jar of hits landed, fingers twisting under the force of his punches, bones breaking, skin splitting, screaming and then silence and screaming again, of arms around his waist, pulling him back, as he kicked a prone body again and again and again...

“Let me go, you bastards!” he heard himself yelling, fighting, struggling against those who were trying to keep him from it. “Let me go!”

The guard who’d hauled him off finally released him, dumping him in a pile of ancient manure, and Charles realized as soon as he fell, that he did not have the strength to move.

The world grayed around the edges.

Coming back from the strange fugue that had enveloped him in the ring - normally, he had far more control - Charles was aware of an argument going on, between the guards and another man, dressed in the rough but rich garments he'd been in, that first day.

“... he broke the rules, sir, killed him...”

“And what is a good brawl, without a little mortality?”

“Respectfully, yer honor, we have lost too many this month as it is and...”

“That man who died tonight was a deserter, deserved hanging, not this leniency of hard labor,” and Charles realized he knew that voice. “I say you give this Mister Willoughby his winnings and do recuse yourselves from my service if you have not the stomachs or the balls for the death of a traitor to our king?”

“Mister Connolly...”

“Or do you suggest your employer lose the five pounds he bid on this match, due to a technicality?”

“Sir...”

“Go declare the winner and collect my winnings, overseer. That is all I require of you tonight.”

That seemed to settle it, at least, and Charles forced himself up into sitting in the muck, watching his unexpected benefactor’s lip curl, watching them go. 

“Fucking English,” Mr. Connolly muttered under his breath.

“Oi, I am English, you bastard!”

“Wrong, young Charles, you are Australian now, free to hate the country that has done this to you,” the other man said as he turned back to the younger man, holding out a hand. “Come, lad, and we shall drop you in a river to clean the stink of death from you.”

Charles reached out, wincing - every muscle in his body suddenly ached. “I wish you would not,” he said. “All manner of beasts live in the waters here.”

“A horse-trough, then,” his better replied, humor shining in those blue eyes. “I could not send you home in good faith, covered in blood as you are.”

Charles swallowed. That hand was still on his hand, those cold, clever fingers encircling his wrist in some kind of caress he didn’t understand, whispering of things he knew he couldn’t truly have.

“What do you want with me, sir?” he asked, voice cracking under the low rumble of the departing crowd. “What will you do with me, killing one of your... of your men?”

“He was a small price to pay,” Mr. Connolly said, and touched the sticky-slick hairs at the back of Charles’ neck, nearly embracing him, the cool of his body a comfort in the heat of the closed barn night. “To know that you could kill. To know how beautiful you look when you kill.”

Charles felt very confused, dizzy, almost, as if he was falling into some endless darkness he couldn’t describe. He had never felt anything so dangerous, so erotic, in all his young years, and he did not understand it. “And why should I not be able to kill?” he challenged.

“One so sweet as you, so pretty, has no right to look so angelic with another man’s blood on your skin,” Mr. Connolly said, and smiled hungrily. “But angelic you are, even now.”

His heart skipped a beat. Two. Not that he would have admitted that, if pressed. “What do you want from me, Mr. Connolly?”

“One of my men will bring you what is yours. When he is gone, you are to come to the house. Servant’s entrance, of course, we would not want Mr. Briggs to hear.”

He stared. “Why?”

“Because I ordered it, lad.” He bared his teeth. “And because you long for what I would give you.”

“Oh, old man? And what is that? A bath?”

But Mr. Connolly was gone, and he was alone, and Charles had never felt so unsure of anything in his life.

Still, after the guard returned with a small pouch and a grudging word, the young convict did as he was told. It made him uneasy to do so, his feet taking the path up to the large house, as if of their own accord. He hadn’t even bothered to retrieve boots or shirt, he realized, almost at the door. 

Mr. Connolly had told him to come, and he came.

As if there was no other choice in the world but to obey.

The last of his strength gave out, however, the adrenalin from the fight sapped utterly, before he even had a chance to knock. He nearly collapsed against the jamb, but then the door was open, light spilling around him, hands catching him before he could hit the fine-finished wood planks of the porch.

“Careful there, lad,” Mr. Connolly murmured to him, drawing him back up, taking his weight. “Carefully. You have lost some blood tonight, I would wager.”

“Shed more of his,” he grumbled.

Mr. Connolly laughed, a harsh and unused sound. “Yes, I would suspect so.”

Charles lost his balance again, and both the man’s hands were around his waist. “Shh, there, lad, come. Let us get you cleaned up.”

Before he had space to protest - or wonder how it was possible - Mr. Connolly swept him up into his arms and carried him into the warm interior of the richly appointed house, up the stairs to his own chambers.

Steaming in the center of Mr. Connolly’s main sitting room was a large copper tub and a small table covered in an assortment of small jars and bottles. Charles had no idea what any of that was for, and he clung to his meddler’s neck as he was placed gently back to vertical.

“Hold on to me,” Mr. Connolly whispered in his ear, hands falling to his ripped and ruined trousers. “Do not want you falling on your arse again.”

“Can stand on my own,” he grumbled.

“Yes,” and one of those infuriating hands palmed the small of his back as the other worked his buttons open, “I am certain you can, lad.”

Charles glowered and tried not to yearn into that contact, but there was nothing, nowhere, for him to go. No man had ever touched him so, as if he was worth something, as if he was precious. He’d gone to his knees a few times, back when he was still just one of a thousand, a hundred thousand, boys trying to survive for another night. But that had always been a rough, unpleasant thing, an experience and a memory he blocked from waking thought.

This... this was what he had always wanted, but Mr. Connolly... it couldn’t...

“Shh,” was murmured in his ear again, and those hands pushed him away a bit, urging his naked, filthy body back towards the tub. “Bath first. Then I shall give you what you desire.”

“What would you know about what I desire?” Charles growled.

Teeth raked along the shell of his ear. “I taste it in you.”

“Tasted? The fuck...”

“Get your arse in the tub, lad.”

And, glowering, Charles did as he was told.

Twice in one night, he thought to himself and he lowered down into the sinfully hot water, had to be a record for him.

He imagined, for one mad moment, that Mr. Connolly was going to offer to bathe him. Which was a silly thing to think, especially as the older man took up a chair on the outskirts of the room, laying one booted foot up on the khaki-covered knee. So at odds with his surroundings, that man, Charles thought, brutal and rough, sitting in the finest space the young man had ever found himself in. 

It occurred to him, then, that his mystery benefactor was as ill-suited to this flippant, fine place as he was.

“The one in the tall blue bottle first, if you please, Mr. Willoughby,” Mr. Connolly directed, relaxing back into the velvet cushions. “Wet your hair, then scrub a goodly amount in.”

“I know how to wash myself.”

“With a bucket in the stable yard. I want you clean.” He leaned forward. “Not a trace of blood, anywhere on your body.”

“And then?”

“And then, as I promised, I shall give you what you desire most.”

Under the water, his cock twitched most urgently.

Charles gritted his teeth, and got on with it.

Mr. Connolly settled back in his seat again, and watched, that queer little smile from the first morning quirking at the edges of his thin mouth. Directions came - _use the cloth, next the salve from that one, a bit over that spot on your cheek if you please_ \- until his cock was heavy and full and the grime - along with half his skin - was scrubbed from his body. A towel was finally held out to him, huge and warm, but Charles clung to the edges of the copper tub, unwilling to rise from it while...

“It is nothing to be ashamed of, your arousal,” Mr. Connolly said, in that infuriating way of his. “It is quite flattering.”

“Oi, who said it was for you?”

“Who else would it be for?” And the towel was waved at him. “Get out of the tub, lad. I am positively famished.”

Confusion only growing, Charles stood defiantly as he could, sloshing water onto the floorboards in the process, skin flushed red and cock standing full at attention. Mr. Connolly’s eyes didn’t leave his body as he swept the clinging droplets from his skin, more and more self-conscious as the seconds ticked out and heat from his groin spread throughout his body.

Finally, after what seemed an agonizingly long time, Mr. Connolly crooked a finger at him. 

“Drop the towel, lad,” he ordered softly, eyes glowing again, “and come to me.”

Charles stumbled forward, body heavy with exhaustion and need and mind spinning from the warmth of the tub and the cool of the room. Mr. Connolly caught him by the wrists as he neared, nuzzling his pulse with his lips and pulling him to straddle his lap on the chair. 

“Oh, but you are a prize, are you not?” he murmured into the still-damp skin of Charles’ wrist, placing an open-mouthed kiss to it. “Such a pretty young thing, unspoilt, virgin...”

“Oi! I am no...”

“Do not deny it.” Those lips began moving up his arm towards his neck, leaving fire in their wake, soothing the bruises from the night’s entertainments. “Your blood speaks of your innocence, your struggle, your anger at the futility of this life you live.” Mr. Connolly latched on to his throat, sucking lightly. “You long for release, yet you have never once thought of taking your life.”

Charles wanted to pull away, wanted to demand answers, but he couldn’t move. Not away from this. He couldn’t risk losing it; whatever it was, he wanted it.

“I could take you away,” those whispered promises continued, fingers stroking down his chest, across the top of his needy manhood. “Give you everything your body desires. Take all your raw potential and wrest it into something glorious, eternal. Would you like that, Charles? Would you like to be eternal? To have a father who will teach you all the things that you might be, who will never abandon you, who will care for you always?”

“I...” He couldn’t think, couldn’t hardly breath. “Mister Connolly, I do not understand...”

“Shh, I know, I know you do not understand. My kind, my love, we are few and far between, and your people have little knowledge of us. It must be this way, and if you are to come with me, I cannot promise that there will be no danger in it.”

His kind? _My love_? “I hardly know you...”

“You know me,” Mr. Connolly said, and his fingers curled, almost cruel-tight, around Charles’ cock. “You have cried out for me every night since I saved you in the stable yard.”

“Sir...”

“You are mine, Charles. Swear to be mine.” 

Pressed so close, held so tight, Charles couldn’t formulate the protest that rose instinctive to his mind. Only that this was familiar, that he’d felt it before, and... 

“You are him,” he said in wonder. “The lover in my dreams. You...”

“My clever lad.” Cool fingers trailed down his cheek, and Mr. Connolly pressed a soft kiss to his ear. “My clever, clever lad.”

Charles closed his eyes, sinking into it. “Kiss me,” he said. “Kiss me proper.”

“And what is a proper kiss, my lad? Here?” Lips were pressed, chaste, to his own. “Or here?” And those lips moved to his throat, his cock pulsing in the other man’s grip. “Shall I give you my kiss, Charles? Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” he begged. “Yes, yes, I want your kiss, I need...”

“Pretty child,” Mr. Connolly murmured back, fond and warm and full of something Charles hadn’t heard since his mother kissed him goodbye.

And sharp teeth pierced the thick vein of his neck.

Charles cried out as his body was tapped, pain coursing through him as his life’s blood was suctioned away. It hurt; by God and all his angels, it hurt. But a hand rubbed his back and another supported his head as it fell back, and he could almost hear that low, whiskey-rough accent still whispering to him. _You are so beautiful, my love, so delicious, the one I have been waiting for, my boy, my son, my perfect childe, I..._

Waves of pleasure replaced the pain, or mixed with it, perhaps, throwing him high, driving him over the edge, vision sparking white, nothing left to him in the world but the man surrounding him...

He could barely think, by the time Mr. Connolly pulled away. He could see blood trickling down his chest, across his left nipple, splashing down onto his now-flaccid cock, the front of the older man’s shirt splashed with his seed.

“What are you?” he whispered.

“Your father, my darling son,” came the answer. “If you will but follow me into the darkness.”

 _I will_ , he wanted to say, _I will be your son, I will be anything you wish me to be, if you kiss me again, if you take me with you and never stop touching me._

But all he was able to summon was a whispered “father.”

Mr. Connolly smiled at him, then. Touched his cheek, his hair, and licked up that line of blood from his skin. “Son,” he acknowledged, and bit him again.

It had been deep before, but now it was everything; with everything offered, everything was taken. Charles clung, feeling his life slipping away from him, until his hands could manage no further purchase on his new father’s shoulders, and he fell into him. He felt cold, freezing, as if he was back in London on some snowy winter’s night, unsure if he would live to see the dawn.

“Shh, none of that,” his new father ordered quietly, pulling his head back up and bringing his own wrist to his mouth. “What kind of _dadai_ would I be, should I not take care of my own child?”

Charles couldn’t keep his eyes open, much less summon the strength for an answer. But the scent of strong copper flooded his nose and his mouth, and then there was the source. His father’s wrist, torn open and held up to him.

“Drink, baby.”

The first few mouthfuls, pressed to his lips, were difficult to get down, his body sluggish to respond, his heart barely able to beat. But even as it slowed, he felt stronger, more certain, and Charles was able to wrap his own fingers around the wound and suckle the thick, heady elixir down. 

Images assailed him as he gulped greedily - children dead, burned in their home, a man, naked and painted blue with woad, an ancient battlefield, dark fangs finding him amongst the bodies and pulling him from the wreckage of a human life, fortresses and kings replacing the open fields and dark forests, roads, machines, guns. Loneliness and need, an absent gnawing desire, unfulfilled through the long centuries. A name, coming through it, twisted and contorted into a modern form, _Herc_...

 _My salvation,_ he found himself thinking, stray feelings of _pridejoyeverything bythegodsyoumyboyyou..._ wrapping around his own as he took his father into himself, making himself his son, as surely as he would have been, had it been this man who laid with his mother, instead of the soldier who’d died, leaving him far behind...

 _Forget about him,_ Charles heard. _I am all you will ever need again._

His heart managed one more feeble pump.

Stopped.

The last thing he felt was his father’s arms, closing around him. Those blue eyes, watching him. 

And the world was gone.

+++++

“I feel like something blond tonight, dad! Think you could roll your ancient arse out of bed long enough to go out for a hunt?!”

Herc sighs as waves of hunger assail him through their bond, and settles back deeper into the soft silk sheets of their Sydney flat. Their little hunting lodge, as Chuck likes to refer to it.

Boy works up such an appetite when they’re in the city.

They have a house out in the country that Herc, personally, likes better. Far from the city and deep in the bush, all big porches and custom-fixed sun shades on the windows and beautiful forest around. The fucking termite mounds still - after two hundred years - creep him out, but it’s Australia, after all, not Eire. Big garage, though, for Chuck to work on his engines, and a hangar, for Herc to keep his little hobby helicopter. Bought it after World War II, a safe place to escape to, after the horrors of the Pacific campaign. 

They don’t make it a habit, signing up with the humans and their wars, but that one had seemed rather urgent. It had taken everything Herc had to put his boy back together afterward, though.

 _Never again,_ he promises himself for what has to be the thousandth time since then. 

It’ll have to be pretty damn desperate, for him to agree to sign up again. No matter how much his childe enjoys playing with their war machines. No matter how free the food is on the battlefield.

It’s just not worth it.

“We’ve got an open bottle of nineteen year old fraternity boy in the fridge, Chuck!” he calls back - Chuck, not Charles any longer, since 1912 or so - and changes the channel. TV. What clever things the human invent. “We need to finish that off before it goes bad!”

A tousled head pops around the corner of their bedroom, and Herc finds himself longing for the good old days, back when men could let their hair grow long and he could really run his fingers through those dark red locks.

Maybe, in a century or two, the style will swing back around.

It always does. 

“But that guy was a brunette.”

“As if your taste has ever been that refined.”

“Fuck the bottled shit, Herc. I want something fresh.”

“We can’t go kill a human every night, baby,” he sighs, and heads over, already knowing he’s going to lose this argument, but whatever. Another day. The blood'll be fine for another day. “You know how suspicious they get when we do that.”

He opens an arm for his son, and is rewarded with a kiss, a cool body fitting to his own. “Just one little uni boy. Just one,” Chuck sighs, and kisses him again. “Doesn’t that sound good, daddy?”

Herc rolls his eyes. Chuck hardly ever addresses him properly - _sire_ is a word that leaves his pretty little lips maybe once a decade or so - but he’s never minded. He knows what he means to the younger vampire. What the younger vampire means to him. It’s there, in the blood that binds them together. 

There’s never any need to say it. 

Investing in that little human stockyard back in 1781 was the best thing he’s ever done. He’d gone in, hoping for nothing more than a steady supply of fresh blood. But instead, he’d found something far more satisfying, far more fulfilling, than anything he’d ever dared hope to have. 

A son, a lover, a meaning in this fucked-up world, to replace that which the Romans had taken from him, so long ago. 

By the gods, the boy was so beautiful. From the moment he'd first laid eyes on him, Herc had never been able to see the end of them.

Chuck had been born to be his.

“Daddy said no, baby.”

“Daddy gonna stop me if I go find us one?” Chuck’s smiling, those dimples of his - the one that had once been caked in mud, pale in the filth - winsome against Sydney’s skyline, spread bright beyond the open windows. “Will daddy be displeased with me, if I go out and get us some take-away?”

He grinds his groin into Herc’s meaningfully. 

And this is why Herc always caves.

Erections are fucking hard to get off the cold, stabilized stuff that are available for purchase on the black market. Warm, pumping blood. That’s what a vampire truly needs. Blood that’s still alive. Not that simply feeding off Chuck isn’t just as good as fucking him, but there’s something primal about tearing some human apart with him, smearing the hot blood over his son’s lips, watching it drip off those pretty lashes of his as he drives into that beautiful body, brutally hard, that’s just...

“You know what you need,” Chuck says, a little breathless, catching the images through their bond. “What I can give you. Herc...”

And Herc smiles, about to say, _you go hunt him down, I’ll let you have first draw_ \- the first mouthful is always the best, flavored with confusion, surprise, that unexpected stab of lust they always feel right before the panic starts to...

Panic.

A shot of it, straight through Chuck. 

His body going stiff in Herc’s arms.

“Holy shit.”

It’s the news. Breaking report. 

A monster.

Like Trespasser.

Another one.

In Manila.

One was a pattern. But two...

Chuck says it, grabs it from their bond, before Herc can. “These things aren’t going to stop coming, are they?”

The older vampire just kisses his boy’s cheek, rubs his belly, holds him tight, the way he always does, when the nightmares menace. “Do we?”

And Chuck smiles then, animalistic and eager, the way he does when they’re on a hunt together. “The humans won’t be able to drop nukes on them forever,” he says, his intentions floating free between them. 

“And you want to drive whatever they’re going to send after them, eh?”

“Don’t you?” Chuck pouts. “The humans are ours.”

Herc kisses his cheek again, considering. “It might take monsters, to fight monsters,” he agrees.

Because Chuck’s right, after all.

If anybody’s going to be killing humans, it’s going to be them.


End file.
